Are Blogs Inferior to Books? (Quote of the Day / Sam Anderson on ‘Ultimate Blogs’)

Snobs and throwbacks may see blogs as inherently less worthy than even the worst books. But the gifted critic Sam Anderson made a sturdy counterargument in a review of Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web(Vintage, 368 pp., $14.95, paperback) nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/44480/, an anthology of writing from 27 sites that captured the interest of editor Sarah Boxer. The lesson of Boxer’s book, Anderson said, is this:

“The best blogs set fire to the dry abstractions of official culture — Greek myth, affirmative action, cosmology, presidential politics — with the spark of immediate, personal enthusiasm.”

Anderson added:

“A print anthology of blog writing seems, at first, to be a deeply paradoxical genre — roughly the equivalent of a cave painting about digital photography, an eight-track guide to ripping MP3s, or a Claymation documentary about the high-tech magic of CGI. In a book, hyperlinks are dead on arrival, animation is frozen into grainy stills, emoticons are ruthlessly suppressed, comments are disabled, and updates take years instead of minutes. And yet, for some of us, the combination makes a certain intuitive sense …

“Most of Boxer’s selections don’t read like a new species of writing, but very like close cousins of the once-venerable print genres that have been forced out of public discourse by the shrinkage of major American media: passionate arts criticism, critical theory, colorful polemics, and above, all the personal essay. Sometimes it seems like blogging is just the apotheosis of the personal essay, the logical heir to 500 years of work by proto-bloggers such as Montaigne, Charles Lamb, G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Parker, and E. B. White. I see no reason for drawing an artificial line between screen and print.”